Dedication

To Becky Helfer

“… love is strong as death …”

—Song of Solomon

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part 1: Fall, Junior Year

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Part 2: Winter

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Part 3: Spring

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Part 4: Summer

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

prologue

“I realize this is upsetting news,” said Ms. Daniels, watching me and Olivia across her enormous wooden desk.

There was no way I was letting her see me cry. I bit my lip and stared at the wall behind her.

It was hung with photographs of ballerinas—on stage wearing elaborate tutus; in leg warmers and cutoff T-shirts, draped over the barre; at dressing tables, the lights around their mirrors casting a halo as they stared soulfully at their own reflections. Across the bottom of each was a scrawled message and an autograph, the first letters of the signatures dwarfing the rest of the name like principle dancers before the corps de ballet. It didn’t matter that you couldn’t decipher all the names. If you had been dancing as long as I had, if you had been in the ballet world your entire life, each of the women on Ms. Daniels’s wall was as recognizable as the president of the United States.

Olivia and I had dreamed that one day our photographs would be on Ms. Daniels’s wall too.

But apparently, they were not going to be.

Ms. Daniels had called us into her office immediately after the final class of the summer intensive, and now she sat and fussed with a heavy-looking silver pen that lay on the center of her immaculate blotter. We had known it probably wasn’t good news she was going to deliver when she asked to see us; girls who met with Ms. Daniels after class almost always walked out of her office crying. So we’d been ready to hear we hadn’t performed as well as we should have this summer and that we were going to be repeating a class in the fall.

But not this.

We’d never imagined this.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Olivia’s bare arm. The strap of her leotard had slipped off her shoulder, and as I watched, she slid it back up. I would have done the same thing—as NYBC dancers, we’d been warned for years about the ramifications of looking sloppy at school—but suddenly the gesture struck me as insane.

Who cared if we looked sloppy anymore?

Ms. Daniels abruptly put her pen in the drawer and glanced at her watch.

Olivia cleared her throat. “We both …” Her voice caught, and for a second I thought she was going to start crying, but she just swallowed and went on. “Zoe and I worked very hard this summer.”

“I realize that,” said Ms. Daniels. “Unfortunately, hard work is not always enough.” She touched her tongue to her lip, then slipped it back into her mouth when she saw me notice.

Olivia and I had been dancing with the elite NYBC—the most competitive ballet school in the country—since we were nine years old. The year we’d auditioned, eight hundred other girls had tried out for twelve spots. We’d planned on auditioning for the studio company when we were juniors in high school. If we’d been accepted, senior year we would have left Wamasset High to take dance classes at NYBC full-time, earning our high school diplomas by correspondence class. We’d get our own apartment in Manhattan and have glamorous tours through the capitals of Europe, brilliant reviews in Dance Magazine and the New York Times, thrilling romances with visiting dancers from Moscow and Paris.

Little girls would put posters of us on their walls.

“I appreciate that this is difficult news to process, so I want to make sure what I am saying is completely clear,” said Ms. Daniels, looking from me to Olivia. “There is no longer space for you at NYBC.”

If I even tried to answer her, I was definitely going to start bawling. For five years, Monday through Friday, we’d come into Manhattan from New Jersey. Saturday mornings, while other girls were sleeping late or shopping at the mall or playing sports or doing homework or going to birthday parties, we went back to the city and danced some more.

And now, according to the school’s director, we were finished.

Did she really think her message might somehow be unclear?

“We understand.” My voice was shaking, and suddenly I felt Olivia’s hand on mine. It wasn’t until she touched me that I realized how tightly I had been squeezing the arm of the chair.

For a second, I took my eyes off Ms. Daniels and looked at Olivia in the chair next to mine. She was still staring straight ahead, and as I watched, her profile morphed into Olivia in the dressing room at the New Jersey ballet school where we’d met when we were four. Can you help me? she’d said, walking over to me with the barrette that had slid out of her long blond hair.

Well, there was no way I was going to be able to help her with this.

I looked back at Ms. Daniels. She adjusted the pin shaped like a toe shoe that held her elaborate silk scarf in place. Once again, her tongue flickered at the corner of her mouth.

The silence deepened. Finally, Ms. Daniels stood up. Then we did too.

“I hope you will both see this not just as an end but as a beginning.” She gave a small, sad smile. “Dance is one thing to do with your life. But it is not the only thing.”

The words were professional. Smooth. I imagined her polishing them semester after semester as she spoke to girls just like me and Olivia. Girls who had worked hard. Who had worked so hard they had done nothing but work. Girls who had given everything they had to dance. But who were still never going to be good enough.

I made this weird noise, half laugh, half cry. It must have sounded as if I was choking, and Livvie slipped her fingers into mine.

Ms. Daniels didn’t acknowledge the sound, just held her hand out to me. Not knowing what else to do, I shook it with my free hand, then turned away and walked across her office to the door, my toe shoes silent on the thick beige carpet.

“Good luck,” said Ms. Daniels. “Keep in touch.”

“Thank you, Ms. Daniels,” said Olivia as automatically as she’d adjusted the strap of her leotard. Then she followed me out of Ms. Daniels’s office and pulled the door shut behind us.

We looked at each other. Neither of us spoke.

This is the worst thing that will ever happen, I thought, and as I stared into Olivia’s enormous green eyes, I knew she was thinking the same thing. This is the worst thing that will happen to us in our entire lives.

part 1

1

Since it was the first day of school, Olivia’s brother Jake gave us a ride, and as he slid into an empty space in the parking lot, Emma Cho, a wildly enthusiastic cheerleader who’d been trying more or less since birth to make Jake her boyfriend, hurled herself at us so violently that for a second I thought Jake had hit her with the car. But the blinding smile she flashed Jake as we got out and the “He-ey, Jake!” she sang to him made it seem unlikely she’d just been rammed by his Honda.

“Hey,” he answered. Jake was a senior, and really good-looking and he was on the football team, so while Emma might have been the most determined, she was hardly the only girl who was madly in love with him. He and his best friend Calvin Taylor, who was the QB, should have listed beating girls off with a stick as an extracurricular activity on their college applications. Jake hugged Emma back, but he didn’t linger, just said “See ya” to all of us and headed over to join a bunch of senior guys who were standing near the edge of the parking lot. When he did that, Emma looked briefly forlorn, then threw her arms around Olivia.

“Hi, Livs!” Her red-and-white cheerleading skirt flared out above her knees. High, high above her knees.

“Hey, Emma,” said Olivia, hugging her back. Right after we got the ax from NYBC, Olivia started teaching a dance class for at-risk girls at this rec center in Newark where her mom’s on the board. A lot of people from our high school satisfied their community service requirement there—including the cheerleaders—and somzetimes Olivia had lunch with the squad on Saturdays after they taught their classes. That my best friend regularly hung out with cheerleaders was one of the great mysteries of my life.

“Zoe!” Emma squealed, hurling herself at me when her hug with Olivia came to an end.

“Oh. Hey. I mean, hi. Hi, Emma.” I patted her awkwardly on the back. The cheerleaders were always nice enough to me, but I couldn’t help feeling like they saw me as this weird birth defect of Olivia’s, something she would have been wise to have removed but for some reason chose to live with.

“I still can’t believe you guys didn’t try out for cheer squad last spring,” Emma said, stepping out of my lackluster embrace and shaking her head in amazement.

“I couldn’t. Soccer,” I answered immediately, even though after one awful season as the world’s worst soccer player, I’d dropped it.

“Dance class,” said Livvie.

Emma made a pouty face. “But we do the tumbling class and we cheer. You could do both.”

“I know!” said Olivia, ignoring Emma’s implied criticism. “You guys are awesome.”

I smiled vaguely.

Placated by Olivia’s praise, Emma waved good-bye to us, made Olivia promise to have lunch with the squad on Saturday, then skittered off to join her fellow cheerleaders. As I watched her go, I spotted Bethany and Lashanna. They waved at me and I waved back. I’d been nervous that they’d be mad when I didn’t go out for soccer again this year, but they’d seemed to understand.

Taking Livvie by the hand, I started walking toward them, but she pulled me back, reaching into her bag and pulling out her phone. “Wait a sec.”

I groaned but stayed put while Livvie fussed with her phone, then swiped at a lock of heavy blond hair that had dropped over her eyes. Until last summer I’d also had long hair, though my hair is so black it’s almost blue. But the day after we were thrown out of NYBC, Livvie came with me to Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow and watched me get approximately three feet of hair chopped off my head. When the woman asked if I wanted to take a lock to remember it by, I just stared at her like, Why would I want to remember my hair?

No more dance. No more soccer. I shivered slightly. My parents and my guidance counselor were on my case to pick an extracurricular activity and to pick it fast. I’d played some tennis up at my grandparents’ this summer, but was I seriously going to try out for the tennis team like I’d told my parents I might? Livvie slipped her arm around my waist, and we stood shoulder to shoulder as she held the camera up at face level. “Say, ‘Olivia is so cheesy.’”

Glad to be pulled out of my thoughts, I repeated, “Olivia is so cheesy,” and she snapped the picture. To say Livvie had dealt better than I had with our being dumped from NYBC would be an understatement. Sometimes I wondered if the secret to being well-adjusted wasn’t blond hair.

“Nice,” she said, angling the screen toward me. Livvie and I were almost exactly the same height—five seven—so our faces were right next to each other. Olivia was grinning widely, her dimple pronounced, her eyes sparkling.

“You look like a prom queen,” I told her. “I’m all ‘Take me to your leader.’” I have big eyes, which I’d always known but which I hadn’t fully appreciated were quite so enormous until I got my pixie cut. I looked exactly like a cartoon drawing of an alien.

“You’re beautiful. Your eyes are seriously awesome. No joke.” She hip-checked me absently, still studying the screen. “Am I crazy or do I have a picture of you wearing this exact same shirt?”

I glanced at the cap sleeve of my dark blue T-shirt. “That’s impossible. I’ve never worn this shirt before.”

“Hmmm …” Livvie bit her upper lip and stared at the image, then shrugged. “Well, whatever.” She dropped her phone into her bag, took me by the hand, and led me toward the front steps of Wamasset High, so named because on this site a proud tribe of Wamasset Indians made their last stand against a group of British settlers who were ultimately successful in their attempt to brutally exterminate every last one of them.

“Do you think it’s comforting to the dead Wamasset that the descendants of their murderers attend a high school named in their honor?” I asked.

Livvie’d been trying to get me to have a more positive outlook on life, and now she turned around and pointed her finger at me threateningly. “Stop that.”

I held my hands up in a gesture of surrender, and we headed into the lobby. The noise was deafening. Bethany and Lashanna weren’t anywhere to be seen, but half a dozen cheerleaders were, including Stacy Shaw—one of the captains of the cheerleading squad—and Jake’s would-be girlfriend Emma.

STACY: (Screaming.) Aaaaah!

EMMA: (Also screaming.) Aaaaah!

(They embrace.)

STACY: (Wails.) I wish you’d gotten captain. (She bursts into tears.)

EMMA: (Also bursting into tears.) Staaaaaaay!

STACY: Emms!!!!

EMMA: I love you so much.

STACY: I love you so much. (They continue to embrace, weeping.)

Olivia and I made eye contact. “You regularly lunch with those people,” I pointed out.

“They’re not as bad once you get to know them,” she insisted.

“Let me guess: That’s what you tell them about me, right?”

Laughing, we turned out of the lobby and down the two hundreds corridor. When we got to my homeroom, Livvie hugged me good-bye.

“Fortress after school, right?” she asked, even though odds were we’d have at least a couple of classes together.

“Right,” I agreed. As I hugged her back, I realized something. “Hey, Livs,” I said, pulling away. “You’re not just my best friend—you’re my extracurricular activity.”

Livvie pressed her hands to her chest and got a dreamy expression on her face. “I’ve always longed to be an extracurricular activity.” Then she kissed me lightly on the cheek and headed down the corridor. “Love ya,” she called over her shoulder.

“Love ya,” I called back.

I stepped into the classroom, nervous for a second that no one I hung out with would be in homeroom with me, but then I saw Bethany. She saw me, too, grinned, and moved her bag off the desk next to hers. Grinning back at her, I made my way across the room. Just as the bell rang I slipped into my seat, and then Ms. Evans raised her head from the papers she’d been shuffling on her desk, walked over to the door, and shut it. She looked around the room at all of us as we slowly got quiet. “Welcome, everyone!” she announced, the tight curls of her perm bobbing as she nodded and smiled at us. “I hope you all had a wonderful summer.”

It was official: junior year had begun.

2

In Olivia’s backyard was an enormous beech tree that had to be about a hundred years old. In it was what we call the fortress.

The fortress was a … thing her dad and Jake built in the tree a few summers ago. It was supposed to be a place that would lure the twins, Tommy and Luke (they were eight now), outside for hours of fun so they wouldn’t drive their mom batshit with their running around in the house.

Everyone called it the fortress, but really it was just a platform. The plan had been for it to be a real fort, with walls and a ceiling and everything (I remember looking at some pretty complicated architectural drawings her dad commissioned), but then Jake made the football team and wasn’t so into building it and Tommy and Luke said a tree fort was babyish and now Livvie and I were pretty much the only ones who used it.

At five o’clock, we climbed up for what we felt was a much-deserved break. It didn’t seem possible that we had so much homework already, but after an hour and a half of working in Livvie’s kitchen, neither of us had put a dent in our assignments. It was only the first day of school. How were we ever going to survive junior year?

We lay on the wooden planks of the fortress, half trying to get our heads around the amount of work we had to do, half watching Jake and Calvin Taylor toss a football back and forth.

“I can’t believe they come home from football practice and play football,” I said. We were on our stomachs, our chins resting on our hands.

“Zoe, we danced for, like, six hours a day, remember?”

I ignored her question, which was rhetorical anyway, and we watched Jake and Calvin in silence. Calvin leaped up to catch the ball Jake had just thrown. For a second he seemed to hang in the air before gently dropping to earth, almost as graceful as a dancer.

“I cannot get over how hot Calvin Taylor is,” said Livvie.

I eyed him lazily. He and Jake were both wearing shorts and no shirts, and their skin was shiny with sweat. Jake wasn’t fat, but compared to Calvin, who was long and lean, he was definitely thickish. You couldn’t see it from up in the tree, but Calvin had a beautiful face that was saved from being too pretty by his nose being a little crooked from where it got broken during some football game.

“I swear to you,” Livvie continued, “we had a moment.”

I groaned. “Are you still talking about that ice cream run you guys did? Livvie, that was, like, a month ago. Besides, you’d have to murder all those cheerleaders and then climb over their dead bodies to get to him.”

Livvie smacked her lips exaggeratedly. “It might be worth it.”

I must have been the only girl at Wamasset who didn’t think Calvin Taylor was God’s gift to our zip code. He’d moved here late—the summer before his sophomore year—and immediately made varsity football and every girl’s top-ten list. He and Jake started hanging out a lot, and at first I didn’t think he was so bad, but then I found out what an asshole he really was.

That year, my freshman year, I had this … well, I guess you couldn’t say boyfriend since we went on exactly one date. His name was Jackson, and his sister was in my and Olivia’s class and he was a sophomore like Jake and Calvin. Livs and I went to a Halloween party at his sister’s house, and Jackson and I ended up hanging out a little, and the next night he called and asked me out on a date. Like a real date—a dinner-and-a-movie date. The whole thing would have been awkward enough (what with our barely knowing each other and his parents driving us to the mall), but then when we got to the theater (we were going to see the new James Bond movie), pretty much the entire football team was there. Most of the guys tried to be cool about it, just all, “Hey, Zoe; hey, Jackson,” and kind of pretending they didn’t see us, but Calvin kept giving us these knowing looks while we were waiting on line to buy snacks. And then he came over to our seats during the previews with a bag of popcorn that he said was “special delivery from the guys for the lovely young couple.” Jackson laughed, but I seriously wanted to punch Calvin. It was hard for me to even think about whether I was glad Jackson was holding my hand during the movie because I was so busy hating Calvin, and later, when Jackson and I were waiting for his dad in this darkish part of the parking lot and Jackson started kissing me, I could barely concentrate because I kept expecting Calvin to jump out from between two parked cars and be all “Surprise!” Jackson’s family moved away the day after our date (okay, it was more like a month later, but between football and dance we never found a time to go out again), so I guess you could say Calvin Taylor not only ruined my first date and my first kiss but also my first (and only) relationship.

The idea that my best friend might be falling for my nemesis was more than I could take.

I rolled my eyes. “Calvin’s the worst, Livs. Don’t be another notch in his belt.”

She was still watching him and Jake. “I’m telling you I’m, like, bizarrely drawn to him.”

Thinking a different tactic might be more effective, I got to my hands and knees and crawled toward Olivia. “He’s so handsome and magnetic. And he lives in that mansion up in the Estates. Beware! Maybe the reason you’re so drawn to him is because he’s really a vampire! Raarh!” When Livvie laughed, I growled, baring imaginary fangs, then rolled onto my back and stared into the leaves of the tree. I could barely feel a breeze, but their shimmering proved that there was one.

“Liv?”

“Mmm?”

“What do you think I should do?”

“About what?” She yawned. “Sorry. I’m so tired. Did I tell you I almost fell asleep in physics? I jerked awake at the last second, but I think Mr. Thomas is onto me.”

“About my life. What should I do with my life?” I sat up and looked over Olivia’s enormous Victorian house and across the hedges at the edge of her yard. Up and down the block were other houses, and in each of the houses were people. What did they do with their lives?

“Teach the dance class with me,” said Olivia, and she rolled onto her side and leaned her head on her hand. “The girls would love you.”

“No dance,” I said, shaking my head. It was amazing to me how … accepting Livvie had been of our being cut from NYBC. She taught a ballet class once a week, organized the spring recital for her dancers, then led a dance camp for two weeks over the summer. She even kept the photo from our first dance recital on her desk—the two of us smiling at the camera, our pink tutus squashed because we’re standing so close together. I, on the other hand, in an attempt to escape my failed dance career, had joined (and then quit) the soccer team, ripped the posters of ballerinas off my walls, thrown out all my dance paraphernalia, and forbidden anyone from uttering the word “ballet” in my presence. I couldn’t help envying her a little, but Livvie had always been the one to take things in stride.

Why should this be any different?

I watched her face, seeing her make the decision not to push me on the dance thing. “And you’re sure you don’t want to do soccer?” she asked.

“Positive.” The girls on the soccer team were awesome, but everything about the sport had felt so wrong. I’d gone out for the team because I wanted to get as far away from dance as possible, but instead of making me forget dancing, soccer had only made me miss it more. I remembered standing on the soccer field, all that sky and grass and the feeling that without ballet, there wasn’t enough gravity to keep me connected to earth.

A leaf dropped onto my foot, and I picked it up and tore a thin strip from the edge. It was incredible how our bloody, blistered feet had healed so beautifully over the past year. My toes shimmered with the pale pink polish I’d chosen when Livvie and I had gotten pedicures on Labor Day.

Livvie stretched her arms over her head, then reached for my ankle and patted it. “Just tell me why you won’t do the dance class,” she said sleepily.

I tried to put into words exactly how I felt. “I just …” I tilted my head and studied the canopy of leaves over our head, as if the answer might be written there. My explanation came slowly. “I thought … it was going to be my whole life, Livs. It was my whole life. And now it’s … what? A hobby? That feels so wrong.”

Livvie squeezed my foot to show she understood. “You could do something else at the rec center, you know? It wouldn’t have to be dance. There’s the tumbling class.”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “You aren’t seriously hooking me up with the cheer squad, are you?”

“The kids in the class are adorable,” she said, not answering my question. Then she yawned again.

I turned away and snorted. “I’m not even dignifying that suggestion with a response.” I thought about how freshman year she and I had satisfied our community service requirement with the performances of The Nutcracker that NYBC did for the city’s public schools. Last year, I’d spent half a dozen afternoons cleaning up garbage at a nearby nature preserve with the soccer team. It was weird how far-reaching extracurricular activities were. Just because you did one thing, a whole bunch of other things—who you had lunch with, where you did your community service, what parties you went to—fell into place.

If you didn’t do something, on the other hand, you had no place to fall into.

I was so busy thinking about how I needed a place that I almost didn’t hear Olivia when she asked quietly, “What do you love, Zoe?”

I made my voice deep and mock-seductive, glad to be distracted from my depressing train of thought. “You, baby!”

But Livvie didn’t laugh. After a minute, I looked over at her. Her eyes were closed, and she was breathing rhythmically.

It had been a long day, and though the sun was low, it was still warm out, warm enough that I could imagine how easy it would be to drift off into sleep. Still, no one fell asleep just like that. Was she faking it?

I nudged her calf gently with my foot, but she didn’t stir. She really was asleep.

Wrapping my arms around my legs, I leaned my cheek on my knees, thinking about what Livvie had asked. It was too embarrassing to admit the truth, like confessing you loved a guy who didn’t know you existed.

Still.

In my head I heard the music start, felt the grip of my toe shoes, the butterflies in my stomach. The tension in my legs intensified, as if I were a racehorse eager for the starting gate to be lifted. For years, every moment I wasn’t dancing was a moment I was waiting to dance. Dancing had been how I knew I was alive. How I knew I was me.

Without it, I somehow … wasn’t.

So there was only one answer to Olivia’s question.

“Dance,” I whispered, so quietly that even if Livvie had been awake, she wouldn’t have heard me. “I love dance.”

3

Mostly to get my parents off my back I went to the first meetings of the yearbook and the newspaper staff. My mom kept telling me I should try out for the play, but one look at the drama club was enough to let me know that it was the last place I wanted to spend my free time. The actors at Wamasset had all the bitchiness of the NYBC dancers, and the idea that I’d spend my free time with a bunch of backstabbers not dancing was laughable. I might have been lost, but I wasn’t insane.

But at least the drama club’s single-mindedness felt familiar. All the other activities—Model Congress, yearbook, Science Club—just seemed like things people were doing to pass the time or to make colleges accept them. I couldn’t see building my life around the passage of a fake Senate vote or the taking of the perfect photo of the volleyball team. It all seemed so … pointless. If I was going to do something, I wanted to give my life over to it, to love it, to wake up in the morning for it like I had for dance.

Was I seriously going to get out of bed every day for Chess Club?

By the time Saturday morning rolled around, it was starting to feel like my extracurricular activity was convincing my parents how busy I was without any extracurricular activities. My mom got up early and went to the gym, but I told her I had too much homework to join her. When I made the mistake of wandering out to the back deck, my dad asked if I wanted to help in the garden. I told him I had homework, and he asked if I could at least walk Flavia before I started working. I did, then sat in the kitchen—just out of his line of vision—with a cup of coffee cooling on the table in front of me. The thought of spending my Saturday morning writing an essay on imagery in the opening chapters of Madame Bovary was more than I could bear.

I am doing nothing, I thought to myself. If anyone asks me what I did this weekend, I can say, I literally did nothing, and it won’t be that annoying thing where people say literally when they mean figuratively.

Then I got Olivia’s text.

coming 4 u 4 lunch. no thank u helping of cheer squad.

A “no thank you helping” was what you got at Olivia’s house if her mom was serving something you didn’t like. For example, if she were to say, “Can I offer you some calf brain?” you might say, “No, thank you.” And then she would put a tiny bit of calf brain on your plate because Mrs. Greco believed a person should try everything at least once.

In the past when Olivia had invited me to go to lunch with her and the cheerleaders, I’d always taken a pass, but if I was still sitting at the kitchen table when my mom got home from the gym, my only options would be starting my essay or discussing with my parents (once again) my future.

The choice was clear. I got to my feet.

Mrs. Greco’s right, I thought as I dumped out the remaining coffee from my cup and put the mug in the dishwasher. You should try everything once.

Except, I quickly discovered, having lunch with Stacy Shaw, Emma Cho, and the rest of the Wamasset cheer squad. Because even the tiniest calf had a bigger brain than they did.

We were seated in a horseshoe-shaped booth big enough for eight. Emma was between me and Olivia. Immediately after we ordered, Emma turned to Olivia, gave her a hug, stroked her hair several times, then rested her head on Olivia’s shoulder with a sigh. “I wish you were my little sister,” she said. “You are just so awesome.”

Despite her general tolerance for cheerleader behavior, Livvie was clearly taken aback by Emma’s petting her as if she were a cat. She didn’t say anything, though, just sat there looking uncomfortable.

I turned my head and asked Emma, “Is that your way of saying you wish you were married to Olivia’s brother?”

“Oh, snap!” said Stacy. She reached across the table to high-five me as the other members of the cheer squad laughed. Emma looked embarrassed, and I felt bad. Maybe I’d needed to rescue Livvie, but did I have to do it by being a total bitch? It wasn’t like Emma had ever done anything to me. Still, there was Stacy’s hand, hovering halfway between us. I guess I could have not high-fived her, thereby alienating both Emma and Stacy in one fell swoop, but I chickened out and gave Stacy a limp high five back.

“You guys, aren’t those kids sooo cute?” wailed a sophomore named Hailey, thankfully changing the subject. Since sliding in next to her in the backseat of the car, I’d observed that every word that came out of Hailey’s mouth was a cry of some kind. It was as if she lived in a state of constant emotional suffering so great she could not contain it, not even to order her salad with dressing on the side.

“They are,” Olivia agreed. She stretched her arms over her head and rolled her neck. The gesture was graceful, but tired. It made me wonder if what I’d thought was discomfort earlier was really exhaustion.

“You guys, I am literally crying for those little girls,” said Emma, who, for the record, was not actually crying. “Their lives are, like, really hard. One of the new girls in the class told me that her brother’s in jail.”

Sitting in the two chairs at the end of the table were identical twins on the cheer squad, seniors named Margaret and Jamie Bailor, who as far as I could tell had received less than their fair share of the squad’s IQ. One of them said, “That’s why it’s really good that we’re teaching them tumbling and stuff.”

“Seriously,” agreed whichever twin had not made the initial point. “They need something in their lives. Tumbling is so much better than drugs.”

That night we lay side by side, Livvie on her bed, me on the trundle bed. The sprinklers were twirling a soothing rhythm outside her window.

“Okay,” she said, “I sense today’s lunch did not help us make strides toward your teaching tumbling with the cheer squad.”

A few glow-in-the-dark stars were still stuck to her ceiling from where we’d put them up in middle school. We’d planned to do an exact replica of the constellations in the northern hemisphere, but halfway through the Big Dipper we’d just started sticking them up any which way.

“An excellent deduction,” I said, yawning.

It was quiet for a minute, and then Livvie yawned also. “It’s so crazy that we’re juniors. Remember when we were freshmen? The juniors were older than Jake! We’re now older than people who were older than Jake used to be.” We both laughed at how nonsensical the last part of her sentence was.

I thought about freshman year, watching the juniors and seniors stand at the doors to the parking lot, swinging their car keys as they waited to go out to lunch with their friends. They’d seemed so … grown-up. So sure of themselves. I rubbed my forehead as if to remove the image of those confident upperclassmen from my brain and said, “I feel like people are going to expect us to know things we don’t actually know.”

“Yes!” There was the rustle of the sheet as Livvie rolled over. In the faint light coming under the door, I saw that she’d propped herself up on her arm and was facing me. “Driving! SATs! College. It always seemed so far away, but it’s not. It’s here.” She lay back down. “I don’t feel ready.”

“It’s still kind of far away,” I pointed out.

“Emphasis on the kind of.”

I could hear footsteps on the floor above us, and I knew it was one of Livvie’s parents checking on the twins. Then I heard someone coming down the stairs, then her mom talking to her dad. The hall light went off, and the room, which had seemed dark already, became nearly pitch-black. I pulled the soft sheet up to my chin, smelling the familiar smell of the detergent Livvie’s mom used.

“Calvin really looks at you when you talk to him.” Livvie’s voice was growing sleepy. “It’s intense.”

“That’s what you said about Milo Bradley,” I pointed out.

Milo Bradley was this boy who went to private school in Manhattan and took classes at Juilliard. He was a couple of years older than us, and Olivia and I met him freshman year right after Christmas break at a café we always went to when we had time between classes. He was cute in this nerdalicious way, and the three of us started getting together for coffee on a regular basis. He and Livvie would have these long, intense conversations, and it seemed pretty clear they were into each other, so I’d try to make myself scarce by doing stuff like staring intently at the screen of my phone and going to the bathroom every thirty seconds. Olivia went to watch him rehearse a few times (he played the piano) in these private practice spaces they have at Juilliard. It was kind of a big deal because we had to lie to her parents about how we were having extra rehearsals just so she could sneak away with him.

Each time they went off together, Livvie and I were sure they were totally going to fool around, but they never did. Once, when they were sitting next to each other on the piano bench, he kissed her hand, and another time he put his arm around her, but that was it, even though Olivia was practically dying to make out with him. She was too scared to ask him what was going on, so finally she just started telling him she was busy whenever he called to make plans. The third time it happened, he said, “I don’t get it. Are you breaking up with me?” I was with her at the time, and when she said, “I guess I am breaking up with you,” I just lost it. I mean, were they even going out? She had to practically beat me to death with a toe shoe to get me to stop laughing loud enough for him to hear me.

It had been a while since I’d teased her about dumping her clearly gay boyfriend, but Milo’s being a really good listener had been something she’d referenced constantly, so her saying the same thing about Calvin Taylor seemed a good reason to bring him up.

“Don’t remind me about Milo,” she wailed. “I’m begging you.”

I yawned. “Calvin’s annoying.” But I was too sleepy to really care if she liked him or not.

“Mmmm,” she answered, and I heard the rustle of sheets as she rolled over. “Don’t worry about finding something to do, Zoe,” she mumbled after a pause. “Everything will work out. I can tell. This is going to be a great year.”

I could feel myself dozing off, surrounded by the sounds and smells of Livvie’s house, as familiar to me as my own. My last thought before I fell asleep was that Olivia was right. This was going to be a really great year.

4

Livvie woke up with a fever Sunday, and she missed school Monday. Monday night when I talked to her she said she’d be in school Tuesday morning, but then she texted me and said she’d woken up with a fever again and her mom was taking her to the doctor.

I called Livvie at the start of lunch Tuesday, but she didn’t pick up the phone. I was standing by my locker, finishing leaving her a message, when Mia Roberts turned down the corridor.

Mia was the girl on the soccer team I knew the least. She’d been new freshman year (before coming east she’d lived in L.A.), and unlike the rest of the team (who hung out pretty much exclusively with one another), Mia hung with a lot of different people. And she didn’t just not hang out exclusively with the team; she also looked nothing like the other girls we played with, all of whom—whether white or black, Asian or Hispanic, freshmen or seniors—were very … American-looking. Clean-cut. Like, you could use any one of them in photos for an antidrug campaign.

But Mia’s hair was bleached white except for the tips, which were blue. When she wasn’t wearing her soccer uniform, she wore black pretty much exclusively, down to black motorcycle boots or Doc Martens.

“Hey,” she said. Today she was wearing a pair of black leggings with lace at the bottom and a black tank top. Her dark eyes were heavily made up with black liner.

“Hey,” I said. I put my phone in my bag.

“You heading to lunch?” Mia asked. I nodded, and she gestured for me to accompany her. “Let’s do it.” She was chewing gum, and while I watched, she blew a small bubble, then cracked it loudly between her teeth.

I fell into step beside her. “I love cracking my gum. It drives my mom batshit when I do it, though.”

“Well, your mom’s not here now, is she?” Mia reached into her bag and pulled out a pack of Juicy Fruit.

I eyed the pack suspiciously. “I don’t know. Sugar gum. Kind of a gateway drug, isn’t it?”

“Try it,” she said, wagging the pack at me. “The first slice is free.”

I reached for a piece, unwrapped it, and popped it in my mouth. “Oh my God,” I said as the fruity taste exploded on my tongue. I had to close my eyes for a second to savor the experience. “This is the first nonsugarless gum I’ve had in years.”

“I know, right?” said Mia, smiling triumphantly. “The dentist loves me. My mom says I’m sending his kids to college.”

“It’s worth it,” I assured her.

We passed a circle of football players, including Calvin and Jake. Each guy was surrounded by a healthy harem of cheerleaders. Jake looked up, saw me, and waved. I waved back. Calvin glanced my way also, but even though we were both at the Grecos’ practically every day, his glance slid over me as if I were some exchange student he’d never seen in his life.

Inwardly I rolled my eyes at what an ass he was.

“So,” said Mia, “how come you don’t do soccer anymore?”

“Um, because I so totally sucked at it?” I offered.

Mia laughed, but she didn’t correct me, which I appreciated. “Does that mean you went back to dancing again?” she asked.

Here was concrete proof of how little anyone outside the dance world understood it. I imagined a universe in which Olivia and I had randomly decided to take a year off from dancing and then—equally spontaneously—decided to return to it. I let myself see the two of us as Mia must have seen us. In control. Masters of our destiny.

The fantasy was awesome, which may explain why I lied to her. “Nah. I was kind of over dance.”

“Got it.” We turned down the hallway toward the cafeteria. It was more crowded here, with some people shoving to get in and others shoving to get out.

“You know,” said Mia, turning to me, “freshman year I was überintimidated by the two of you.”

I practically choked on my gum. “You were?”

“I was!” Mia imitated my tone exactly, then laughed. “Is that so surprising? You’re both tall and gorgeous. And you disappeared into Manhattan after school every day.” We stepped into the river of kids headed to the cafeteria. “I saw you once at The Nutcracker when my mom and I took my niece. I mean, I didn’t see you see you. Like, I couldn’t pick you out. But your names were in the program.”

I shook my head, as much at the idea of Mia’s being at the ballet as at the thought of her searching for us in a sea of dancers. “That’s so weird. I mean that we were on your radar like that.”

Mia raised an incredulous eyebrow at me. “It’s not weird, Zoe. You and Olivia were famous. I figured you were way too cool to hang out with regular people like me.”

“Really? You thought we were cool?” I squeaked, so uncool that both Mia and I laughed. She held open the door to the cafeteria and I followed her in. As we joined a table, I composed a text in my head to Livvie, telling her about how cool and terrifying the population of Wamasset had once found us.

I was irritated that Livvie didn’t respond to my text, which was, frankly, hilarious. Wasn’t she just sitting in the waiting room of Dr. Weiss, our pediatrician? Or sitting at Driscoll’s Pharmacy waiting for her mom to fill a prescription? Or sitting and waiting for me to call her? I didn’t stay home sick from school all that often, but when I did, that was my routine. The bell rang, ending math, our last period of the day, and Mr. Schumacher nodded in my direction. “You’ll give Olivia the homework.”

“Sure,” I said, then muttered under my breath, “if she ever texts me back.”

I went to my locker and slowly made my way outside. It was sunny but way cooler than it had been that morning, and I shivered, wishing I’d worn a jacket. The football team was heading out to the field all the way on the other side of the campus. I considered asking Jake if he knew where Olivia was, but the team was so far away I couldn’t even figure out which of the uniformed guys he was.

Just as I decided it wasn’t worth bothering, since Jake wasn’t going to have any idea anyway, my phone rang. Livvie! Finally. I dug my phone out of my bag.

But it wasn’t Livvie. It was some 212 number I didn’t recognize. This was getting so annoying.

“Hello?”

“Zoe?”

It was Livvie. But why was she calling me from an unfamiliar number?

“Livs!” I was so glad to hear from her I wasn’t even mad that she hadn’t called me back earlier. “Where have you been all day? Whose phone are you calling from?”

“My phone’s out of juice. Zoe, I have to tell you something.” Olivia’s voice sounded thin, as if she were calling from far away on a line with a bad connection. It didn’t help that it was super noisy in front of the school, where all two thousand members of the student body seemed to have chosen to gather before heading off to their afternoon activities. I pressed my free hand to my ear, trying to hear better.

“Where are you?” I moved away from the crowded concrete circle by the front entrance and onto the lawn.

“Zoe, I’m … I’m at the hospital.”

“The hospital?” For some reason, I thought of the twins. Could one of them have been in an accident? The possibility made my heart drop. Tommy and Luke could be super annoying, but they were also adorable. Last year, when they were in second grade and neither of them had their front teeth, Tommy would pronounce Zoe “Thoe.”

“I’m sick, Zoe,” said Livvie.

“Wait, you’re sick?” I was still thinking about the twins. “Hang on a second … what?”

“I’m at UH,” said Olivia.

University Hospital was only a few blocks from the Fischer Center, where NYBC was located. We’d driven by it every day on our way to and from dance classes and performances, its glass towers telling us we were just minutes from our destination or that we’d begun the journey home.

“But you were just at the doctor’s office.” I knew, even as I said it, that it was a stupid thing to say. It wasn’t like there was no way to travel from the doctor’s office to the hospital.

Olivia’s voice was freakishly precise. “The doctor found a bruise on the back of my leg,” she said.

“I saw that!” I shouted, remembering the bruise from when I’d slept over Saturday night. It was dark purple and spidery, and I’d almost asked her about it, but then we’d started talking about something else and I’d forgotten.

Livvie continued. “Well, she saw it and she asked how I’d gotten it, and I said I didn’t know, and then she found this other one on my arm—on the back—”

“I didn’t see that one,” I admitted. Why was I interrupting her? I pressed my lips together to get my mouth to stop asking questions.

“It’s there,” Olivia told me, as if I’d doubted her. “I saw it in the mirror. Anyway, then the doctor started asking about the bruises, and how long I’ve had the fever, and then my mom said that I’d been really tired lately and she asked if maybe I could be anemic. And Dr. Weiss said she wanted us to go to the Med Center.”

The Med Center was a cross between a doctor’s office and an emergency room. They had X-ray machines and doctors and stuff, but I didn’t think you would go there if you were having a heart attack. “Yeah,” I said, “I know where that is. Remember when my dad stepped on a nail last summer? My mom and I took him.”

Looking back at that conversation, I can’t help wondering: Did I know? Did I know what was coming, and did I think that as long as I wouldn’t let Livvie say the words, they wouldn’t be true?

“They took blood,” she went on. “And they found abnormal cells.”

“Abnormal cells,” I echoed.

“Abnormal cells,” she repeated. “And they said they wanted us to go to UH so they could do a bone marrow aspiration. That’s when they take some bone marrow out of your pelvic bone with a needle.”

“A needle? Oh God, Liv.” I clutched my arm in sympathy, even though I knew that wasn’t where your pelvic bone was.

“My dad came,” Livvie said. Her voice caught for a second, but she didn’t cry. “He came to meet us, and the doctor said that they’d found blasts in my bone marrow.”

“What does that mean?” I whispered.

“They admitted me,” she went on, ignoring my question, “and they put in this thing called a central line. It’s so the medication gets right into your body.”

“The medication?” My voice was a whisper.

“I have leukemia, Zoe.”

I gasped.

“But that’s … that’s impossible.” It was impossible. I knew it was impossible. How could Olivia have leukemia? “There’s a … I mean, there has to be some mistake. How could you be getting medicine already?” Somehow that was the most implausible part of what she’d told me. I’d slept at her house Saturday night. She’d been fine. I’d talked to her this morning. Eight hours later she was in the hospital and getting medicine? How could they even diagnose what she had that fast?

“It’s true, Zoe.” Olivia’s voice quivered. I heard a voice in the background, and Livvie said, “My mom wants me to get off the phone. The doctor just came in. Can you come? I need to see you.” It sounded like she was starting to cry.

“I’m on my way,” I said, my voice fierce. Then I said it again, as if maybe she would doubt me. “I am on my way.”

“Okay,” said Livvie. “Love ya.”

We always said Love ya. We ended every phone call, every chat, every conversation the same way.

See you tomorrow. Love ya.

Gotta go. Love ya.

My mom’s calling. Love ya.

I have leukemia. Love ya.

“I love you, Livs,” I said, my voice nearly breaking on her name.

“I love you too, Zoe,” she answered. I could hear that she was crying. And then she was gone.

I stood on the edge of the lawn, the phone still pressed to my ear. Cars pulled in and out of the parking lot, and kids tumbled from the building, taking the stairs two at a time as they raced into the liberty of the afternoon. The sky over my head was almost painfully blue, the grass a bright and vivid green. It was a crisp, beautiful, perfect fall day.

All that beauty was completely wrong. The sky should have been black, the grass withered, the students wailing with grief. Olivia is sick! I wanted to howl. What are you people doing? My friend is sick! It was impossible—the sky, the cars, the kids walking around as if it were a day like any other day. Nothing made any sense.

Before I could start screaming, I turned and raced for home.

5

My dad was in Washington on assignment, but I didn’t even think to be relieved when I saw my mom’s car in the driveway—what if she’d been at the gym or a meeting and I’d had to wait for her to return my call and come home, had to sit there on the front porch cooling my heels and losing my mind while Olivia stared at the door of her hospital room, expecting me to walk through it any minute? I flew up the wooden steps of our front porch and into the house. Flavia barked as I entered.

“Mom! Mom!” I could hear the hysteria in my voice.

My mom’s an architect, and her office was in the back of the house, but she must have been in the kitchen because she appeared in front of me about a second after I threw open the door. “What is it? What’s happened?” She was holding the coffeepot, like maybe she’d been pouring a cup when she heard me yelling.

Still panting from my sprint home, I managed to choke out, “Livvie’s … she’s sick. She’s in the hospital. We have to go.”

“Olivia’s sick?” My mom’s eyes popped wide with concern.

“We have to go, Mom. She’s at UH. We have to go right now.” I started pulling on her arm, like when I was a little kid.

“She’s in the hospital?” My mom grabbed my elbow.

“That’s what I said.” Why was she not moving? “Now let’s go.”

“Zoe, sweetheart, you have to explain what’s going on.” Instead of racing for her keys and shoes, she put her hand on my shoulder. “Calm down. What’s wrong? What’s wrong with Olivia?”

“Mom, I told you! She’s sick. She has leukemia. She’s in the—”

“She has leukemia?” She dropped my arm and pressed her fingers to her lips. “My God! When did this happen?”

“When do you think it happened?” I slapped my forehead. “Oh, yeah, it happened last week, only I forgot to tell you about it.”

“Zoe, there’s no need to get—”

“Why aren’t you hurrying?” I ran over to the stairs and grabbed a pair of shoes. “We have to go.” My voice was shrill, and my eyes stung.

For a second, my mom stared at me from across the room as I stood there, holding her black ballet flats out to her. If she didn’t put on her shoes and get in the car, I was seriously going to take the keys and drive myself. I had my learner’s permit. I’d been driving (with one of my parents in the car) for months. I would make it.

As if she’d read my mind, my mother crossed to where I was standing. Her hand shook, and she had trouble slipping her feet into the shoes. By the time she was done, I’d grabbed her bag and gone to the front hall. Without saying another word, we headed out the door.

My mother’s a talker. It’s like the monologue most of us have running in our head at any given time is, in my mom’s case, dialogue. Should I have the chicken salad sandwich … oh, it’s kind of crowded in here … I better not forget to write this down … it’s really taking a long time for the light to change … I think I should buy this T-shirt in blue and black. The whole drive into Manhattan she talked and she talked and she talked.

“You know, honey, I went to school with a girl who had leukemia, and she was fine. And that was years ago. They’ve got treatments now that are much, much better than the ones they had then.”

“Mmmm-hmmm.” What was leukemia? I didn’t even know exactly. I knew it was terrible. I knew people could die from it. But what was it? Olivia said they’d found something in her blood … I picked at a split nail on my thumb, biting and pulling at it.

“And University Hospital is the best. Just the best. If any one of us got sick, I’d want us there. And do you remember my friend Beth? Her brother-in-law is the head of … cardiology there, I think. Or it could be dermatology. Anyway, he’s a big, big deal. Maybe I’ll ask Beth to call him. It’s always good to know a doctor who’s on the staff when you’re a patient.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Livvie’s heart, Mom. Or her skin.” The nail split low, and I peeled it off, glad to focus on the pain.

“Well, it’s always good to know a doctor,” she repeated. We were driving up West End Avenue. The Fischer Center and NYBC were just north of us; my mom and Olivia and I must have done this drive a thousand times. Ten thousand times. Our being in the car together driving to Manhattan after school would have been perfectly normal if Olivia had been sitting with us and my mom hadn’t put her blinker on for another five blocks.

“Now …” She leaned forward and peered out the windshield, then braked for a yellow light. I wanted to scream at how slowly she was going. The back of the hospital loomed to our left. “I think the main entrance is right around the corner, so I’m going to … No. Wait. I can’t turn here.” She clicked off her blinker, even though there was no one behind us. “Maybe I’ll just look for a spot.” She leaned forward again and squinted. “Does that sign say ‘no parking any time’?”

The light was still red. My finger where I’d peeled off the nail throbbed. Something inside me felt tight, as if I were a balloon that had been blown up too big. I reached for the door handle. “I’m going to meet you inside.”

“Just give me a second to park.”

I opened the door. The cool breeze made me realize how stuffy it had been in the car. Why had we driven all the way with the windows closed?

“Zoe, wait!” The light south of us must have changed. Cars came up behind ours and started honking. My mom’s voice was shrill. “Zoe, the light’s changing.”

Actually, it had already changed, but I was out of the car. I slammed the door shut, ran three long steps, and, without even meaning to, did a grand jeté onto the curb as if I’d turned back the clock and Livvie and I were still ballerinas together.

6

My mom had been right—the main entrance to the hospital was just around the corner. I felt guilty for abandoning her and waited a minute, thinking maybe she’d be right behind me. But she wasn’t, and I couldn’t take standing there. I pushed through the revolving glass door and crossed the lobby, my sandals silent on the white marble floor. There was a sign next to an enormous desk directing visitors to show their ID. I’d left my wallet in the house not thinking I’d need it, but luckily the security guard didn’t ask me for anything except Olivia’s name. He looked her up in a computer and waved me to a bank of elevators off to the right. On the black-and-white visitor’s sticker he’d written ROOM 1238 in blue Sharpie.

When the elevator doors opened on the twelfth floor, I found myself looking at a dark gray sign that read PEDIATRIC ONCOLOGY.

Oncology. The word was like a punch. Oncology. Leukemia was cancer.

Olivia had cancer.

As I stepped out of the elevator, a little boy, maybe three or four, walked toward me down the hallway. He had no hair, and he was holding a stuffed animal, chatting with a woman who looked like she was probably his grandmother. The woman asked him a question and he said, “Of course!” and she laughed.

He has cancer. That little boy has cancer.

They walked by. Had Olivia seen the boy? I wanted Olivia not to have seen him. I had some idea it would be upsetting to her to have seen a little boy with cancer. But of course Livvie had cancer, so maybe seeing a kid with cancer wouldn’t upset her. How can kids get cancer? That is so completely screwed up. I could feel myself getting mad, not at God—who I don’t believe in—but at people who believe in God. Because what kind of a fucked-up God would make a world where kids can get cancer? I headed down the hall in the opposite direction from the boy, but the numbers were going down, not up. The mad feeling was feeding on the tight feeling, and I was actually having trouble catching my breath. I turned around. The boy and his grandmother were gone. I half walked, half ran along the hall back the way I’d come, until I got to room 1238. Next to the room number, a piece of paper had the handwritten words Olivia Greco.

I pushed on the door. It was big and heavy-looking, and I shoved it hard, expecting a lot of resistance, but it shot open. “Sorry,” I said by way of greeting, as everyone in the room jumped at the sound of the door slamming open.

The room was small, maybe half the size of Olivia’s room at home. Livvie, wearing a blue hospital gown and a pair of blue sock-like booties, was sitting on the bed with her mom. Her dad was sitting in a pinkish pleather chair next to the bed, and Jake was sitting on the radiator under the window. There was a gorgeous view of the Hudson River, which looked in the afternoon sun as if someone had painted the surface of the water a vivid, almost neon, orange.

Guess what, kids! The bad news is: You have cancer. But hey, check out these views!

Olivia was pale, like maybe she still had a fever. But except for that and the IV disappearing into the sleeve of her hospital gown, she looked exactly the way she’d looked when I’d left her Sunday morning after our sleepover.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said.

I felt relieved to be seeing her but also strangely shy. I wasn’t sure if it was okay to go over and sit with her. Not that there was enough room on the bed for me, Olivia, and her mom. And not like I could ask her mom to get off. Unsure of what to do, I just hovered near the door.

“Hi, Zoe,” said Mrs. Greco, giving me a sad smile. “You were so good to come right over.”

Olivia’s mom was always dressed beautifully. She didn’t work, but she did a lot of volunteer stuff—raising money for a wildlife sanctuary near us, serving on the school board. I could picture her getting dressed this morning. She’d chosen a white blouse and pale yellow suit. She’d slipped a string of pearls around her neck and snapped the clasp. Before her committee meeting or her charity lunch, she’d be taking Olivia to the doctor. Brushing her bobbed blond hair, she’d expected to hear her daughter had strep throat or maybe a virus. Nothing out of the ordinary. As she’d slid her feet into her beige suede pumps, could she possibly have imagined that before the day was over, she’d be wearing them while sitting on her daughter’s hospital bed?

“Hey,” said Jake. He came over and gave me a hug.

“Hi,” I said. He was wearing his football uniform, and he looked pale, paler even than Olivia. His pallor inspired an insane fantasy—that Jake was the one who was sick. Without even meaning to, I conjured up the phone call from Olivia that could have been. I have terrible news. My brother has leukemia. I pictured coming to the hospital to see Jake or one of the twins, and as I did, I felt my heart leap with joy. Then I felt awful. I was wishing sickness on a healthy person. But no, it wasn’t like that. This was a trade. A sick person for another sick person. A different sick person. An eye for an eye.

An eye for an eye? Was that even what that saying meant?

And since when did I quote the Bible?

Livvie patted a spot on the bed, but before I could move toward it, her mom stood up, clearly preparing to block my approach. “Zoe, can you clean your hands very carefully?” She nodded at the Purell dispenser on the wall.

I quickly crossed to it and doused my hands, rubbing the Purell in even when it stung my finger where I’d ripped off part of the nail. Then I went over and sat next to Livvie, who shifted to make room for me. I put my arm around her, letting my shoes hang off the edge of the bed, and she laid her head on my shoulder. I wanted to say something. Anything. But everything I thought of saying sounded completely stupid and awful. Of all the bizarre things that had happened today, my being tongue-tied around Olivia might have been the strangest.

“Well, this completely sucks,” she said finally, and then we laughed. The laughter felt a little bit hollow and a little bit forced. Still, it felt good to be sitting next to Olivia and laughing. It felt normal. Olivia looked normal. She sounded normal. Everything about this moment was totally normal.

Except that it wasn’t.

“You are going to be fine,” said Livvie’s mom, patting Olivia’s hand.

“My mom keeps saying that,” Olivia whispered, loud enough for her mother to hear.

Her mother smiled and kept patting. “Because it’s true,” she said.

“Okay,” said Livvie. There was a little frustration in her voice but none of the venom that had been in mine when I was screaming at my mother earlier. Even with cancer, Olivia was a nicer person than I was.

“How are you feeling?” I asked. “Are you feeling okay?”

“I feel …” She considered the question carefully, then turned her head to face me. “I feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience. Like none of this can really be happening.” Her voice shook a little bit on the word happening.

I squeezed her shoulders, worrying after I did it that I’d somehow mess up her IV.

The door opened less dramatically than it had when I’d entered. I expected it to be my mom, or maybe one of Olivia’s grandparents, but instead Calvin Taylor walked in. He was also in his football uniform. His hair was messy and there was a long scrape on his forearm. In his hands was a cardboard tray with four cups of Starbucks coffee.

“Piping hot,” he said to the room. Then he went over to Olivia’s dad and handed him one of the cups. Without getting off his phone, Mr. Greco nodded his thanks.

“You were so sweet to run out and get these,” said Mrs. Greco as she took a cup from him. “And after you drove Jake all the way here.”

“I didn’t mind,” he said. “Really.” Then he looked at Olivia. “Sure you don’t want one?” He touched her foot gently and smiled at her.

She shook her head. “No, thanks.” I glanced at her, but there was no obvious response to Calvin’s being in her hospital room or touching her.

He thrust his chin vaguely in my direction by way of greeting, then went over to where Jake was sitting and stood beside him. “Hey, man,” he said, handing him one of the two remaining cups. Jake said something to him, and Calvin said, “Sorry,” quietly, and went over to the Purell dispenser.

What was Calvin Taylor doing leaving football practice to drive Jake into the city and go on a coffee run for the Grecos? He wasn’t part of the family. Not that I was part of the family, but I was pretty damned close. Calvin had only lived in Wamasset for a few years. I’d known Olivia for more than a decade.

I felt irritated that the Grecos were asking Calvin to help out and then irritated at myself for being irritated. The Grecos needed support now. If Calvin offered Jake—or any of them, really—that support, I should be happy to see him in Olivia’s hospital room.

Still, I wasn’t. And it wasn’t just because he’d teased me about Jackson. There was something about Calvin—the way every girl at school drooled over him, the way the school newspaper ran his picture on the sports page every five seconds, the way he was too important to bother to acknowledge me. Even his whole I’m-so-helpful-let-me-be-your-chauffeur-and-delivery-boy routine, which the Grecos were clearly falling for, rubbed me the wrong way.

Was I the only one who could see that he was a self-satisfied ass?

The door opened again. This time my mom walked in. “Hi, guys,” she said quietly, and then she used the Purell dispenser. I was surprised that she knew she had to do that.

Olivia’s mom stood up and went over to my mom. They hugged and then started talking quietly, too quietly for me to hear what they were saying. Over by the window, Calvin and Jake talked. Olivia’s dad typed on his BlackBerry. Even though there were almost half a dozen people in the room with us, I felt like we were suddenly alone together.

Olivia must have felt the same way because when she started talking, it was clear that she was talking just to me. “I really think I’m going to be okay,” she said. Her eyes had purplish circles under them. How long had they been there? How had I not noticed? “I was freaking out before, but … I don’t know, I just sense that I’m going to be okay.”

Immediately I said, “Of course you’re going to be okay.” Then I regretted saying it. I hoped I didn’t sound too much like her mom.

The door to the room opened again, and this time a woman in a white lab coat came in. She was short, with gray streaks in her brown curly hair.

“Hello!” She gave a wave to the room, then pressed the Purell dispenser and rubbed her hands together. “I’m glad to see Olivia has so much company.”

“We don’t want to tire her out, Dr. Maxwell,” said Mrs. Greco quickly.

“If you think it’s better for everyone to go, we’ll send them all home,” said Mr. Greco, getting to his feet.

The way Mr. Greco—who was a big partner at his law firm and who talked to pretty much everybody as if they were his employees—spoke to Dr. Maxwell, I could tell she was important.

Dr. Maxwell smiled at Olivia. “Are you tired?”

Olivia gave a little shrug. “I’m okay.”

“Good.” Her round tortoiseshell glasses caught the light and made it seem as if her eyes were sparkling. Under her lab coat she had on a pretty silk blouse. She came over to the bed. “You must be Zoe,” she said, and when I nodded, she went on. “Olivia told me about you. She’s really going to need her friends right now.” Her voice was matter-of-fact, like, Just to be clear, having cancer is not something good.

“Of course,” I said.

Dr. Maxwell slipped up the sleeve of Olivia’s hospital gown, checked something on Olivia’s chest briefly, then nodded. “It all looks good.” She glanced over her shoulder at the IV line hanging from the pole. “How are you feeling? Are you nauseated?” Her tone was the same as it had been when she’d told me Olivia would need her friends, and I started to get the sense she was just matter-of-fact about everything.

Olivia shook her head. “Not yet. I have a funny taste in my mouth.” Livvie ran her tongue along her teeth and made a face. “It’s weird.”

“Unfortunately, I can’t help you with that, but if it’s making you nauseous, let me know. Like I said before, it’s hard to get the horse back in the barn once he’s out.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but Olivia must have because she nodded. Dr. Maxwell looked around the room. “Everything seems okay for now,” she said. “Olivia’s off to a good start.”

I hadn’t noticed how quiet the room had gotten while Dr. Maxwell was examining Olivia, but as soon as she gave her assessment, the buzz of conversation that started up again made me feel the silence her presence had generated. It reminded me of how it had been in a dance class when Martin Hicks, the NYBC director, would pay one of his occasional visits. You didn’t realize how tightly you’d been holding everything in—how high you’d been lifting your leg, how far you’d extended your arms—until he left and you felt the collective tension seep out of the room as everyone literally gave a sigh of relief.

Now people went back to their conversations. Dr. Maxwell stood next to the bed. “So,” she said, “Olivia and her family and I had a long talk earlier, but she asked me to come back and explain some things about her illness to you.”

I looked at Olivia. “Really? You wanted her to explain everything to me, too?”

Livvie nodded. I loved her so much right at that instant I almost cried.

“Now, what do you know about leukemia?” asked Dr. Maxwell.

“It’s got something to do with Olivia’s blood,” I answered, purposely not using the word cancer.

“Good,” said Dr. Maxwell, and even though we were talking about a deadly disease that my best friend had, I felt glad to have gotten the answer right. “It does have to do with blood. Specifically, it’s a cancer of the blood.”

“Actually, I was trying to avoid the c word,” I explained.

Olivia laughed, and even Dr. Maxwell cracked a smile. “We use the c word a lot around here,” Dr. Maxwell assured me. “Now, there are different types of leukemia. Most children and teens get something called acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL. Olivia has acute myeloid leukemia, or AML. It’s a cancer more commonly associated with males in their sixties.”

Livvie turned to me. “I have old-man cancer. Isn’t that so humiliating?”

“It is, actually. But I won’t tell anyone,” I promised.

Dr. Maxwell was shaking her head. I couldn’t tell if she was amused or irritated by the way we were talking. “In a healthy person,” she went on, “blood is formed inside the soft, spongy part of the big bones in your body, such as your femur. You know what your femur is?” I nodded. Our first year at NYBC, a girl in our class had had a skiing accident and broken her femur. I still remembered when one of the worst dancers in our class had pulled us aside to tell us about the accident. She may never dance again. Her face had been bright pink with the drama of the moment.

“Your femur’s here.” I hit my thigh as I said it.

“Correct,” Dr. Maxwell said. “So blood is born—formed—in the bone marrow. There, immature cells called blasts grow into mature blood cells: white blood cells, red blood cells, or platelets. Think of bone marrow as a school. Or a house. The kids grow up, learn a trade, then leave home and go to work at a job.

“But leukemia stops blood cells from doing that. In a person with AML, instead of making normal blasts, which grow into normal blood cells, the bone marrow starts making cancerous cells. They divide quickly and uncontrollably. They don’t do their jobs. And they fill up the bone marrow so that there’s no room for normal, healthy cells to be made or to grow. The immature cells are strong and hard to kill. They’re like child soldiers.”

Dr. Maxwell pointed behind her at the IV bag hanging on the pole beside Olivia’s bed. “The drugs we’re giving Olivia right now are drugs that target rapidly dividing cells, such as myeloblasts.”

“And hair,” Olivia said. Her voice was quieter than it had been. I patted her arm, not sure what else to do.

“And hair,” Dr. Maxwell said, and now I was grateful for how matter-of-fact she was about everything. “Because chemotherapy targets all rapidly dividing cells, it unfortunately doesn’t only get cancer cells.”

I’d always wondered why people with cancer lost their hair. “Why can’t they invent drugs that target rapidly dividing sick cells only?” I asked.

“Well, we’re working on it,” Dr. Maxwell said. She pushed her glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “I promise you. We’re all working on it.”

I couldn’t take Dr. Maxwell’s being so nice. It made me want to cry. Instead I asked, “Will she get sick? I mean, will she throw up?” Livvie made a face. She hated throwing up. Not that anyone likes it, but Livvie really really hated it.

“She may experience nausea and vomiting,” Dr. Maxwell said. “Chemotherapy triggers a chemical response in the brain that makes some people sick to their stomach. But the good news is we have a lot of drugs to make Olivia comfortable. Hopefully she’ll only have very mild side effects.”

“That’s kind of lame good news, Dr. Maxwell,” said Olivia.

“It is,” Dr. Maxwell agreed, and she stroked Olivia’s forehead gently. I’d never seen a doctor do something like that.

“When can she come home?” I asked. If she was home by Friday, I could spend the weekend at her house with her. We could watch distracting movies all day.

Dr. Maxwell’s voice was businesslike. “Three to four weeks.”

Three to four weeks? I tried to keep my voice neutral. “I thought … I thought maybe she’d be home this weekend.”

Dr. Maxwell shook her head. “The chemotherapy itself only lasts for about a week, but it destroys so many blood cells that a person is very vulnerable to infection. We keep her here until her blood counts go up.”

My head spun. How could Livvie be in the hospital for an entire month?

They were both staring at me. I had to say something, but my panic had parched my lips and my tongue felt glued to the roof of my mouth. “Well …” I cleared my throat, hoping to make my voice more normal. “And then … that’s it, right? She’s done?”

Livvie shook her head. “That’s just the first round. Then I have to do it three more times.”

“Three more times?” It came out like a wail, which I immediately regretted.

My response triggered something in Livvie, who suddenly looked distraught. “And I might not be able to go to school between treatments at all.”

“Wait, you’re going to miss months of school? I—” I bit my tongue. Literally. Because here’s what your best friend doesn’t need to hear you say when she’s just found out she has cancer: I can’t deal with that.

“This is a lot to take all at once, I know,” said Dr. Maxwell. She furrowed her forehead in a way that somehow managed to be concerned and not pitying. “And it’s not the last time you’ll be able to ask me questions.” Dr. Maxwell put her hand on Olivia’s shoulder. “I’ll see you tomorrow, but if something comes up during the night, they’ll page me.”

“Okay,” said Olivia. “Thanks, Dr. Maxwell.”

“Yes,” I said, trying to capture an optimistic tone. “Thanks for explaining all of this to me.”

She smiled at me. “Olivia is very lucky to have a friend like you.”

Dr. Maxwell said good-bye to everyone, and when the door had closed behind her, Mrs. Greco clapped her hands together once. “Now I’m sending everyone home. Our girl needs to get her rest.”

I was surprised that Olivia didn’t object, but when I looked at her face, she seemed tired, and I thought maybe she was relieved that everyone was leaving.

My mom came over and gave Olivia a long hug, then touched me lightly on the shoulder. “I’ll meet you outside.”

Calvin and Jake said good-bye. When Calvin was hugging Livvie, she gave me a little wink and a thumbs-up behind his back, and I actually laughed.

I got off the bed and stood over Olivia. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but she looked somehow frailer than she had when I’d first walked in, as if she’d gotten smaller over the past thirty minutes.

Not wanting her to read my thoughts, I bent down and hugged her. She squeezed me back. There was nothing frail about her hug, and the strength in her arms made me feel better.

“This is going to be okay,” I whispered into her shoulder. “You’re going to be okay.” She gave a tiny squeak, and I could tell from the way her body shook that she was crying. It was hard to believe that just a minute ago she’d given me the thumbs-up about Calvin Taylor’s hugging her.

Remembering how my getting upset earlier had made her get upset, I forced myself not to cry as I pulled away. “I’ll see you tomorrow, ’kay?”

“Thanks, Zoe,” she said. She wiped the tears off her cheeks, and no new ones fell. “I love you.”

“I love you too, Liv.”

The whole way home, my mom talked. She talked about how Mrs. Greco was going to arrange for Olivia to Skype her classes. She talked about how the doctors felt there was every reason to be optimistic. She talked about how Olivia was getting the best medical treatment there was. She told me she’d called my dad, who was on his way home. Every once in a while, she turned to me and patted me on the knee or stroked my hair.

“You okay, honey?” she asked about twenty times.

“I’m … yeah. I’m okay,” I said each time. I couldn’t find the words to describe the tight feeling that had disappeared for a little while when I was with Olivia but had come back again now that we were in the car. Months. She was going to be out of school for months. She had to go through round after round of chemotherapy. My mind danced from one detail to another, skittishly skimming the surface of the situation. I would picture Dr. Maxwell’s glasses, then the dark circles under Olivia’s eyes. I felt Olivia’s shoulders shaking as I hugged her. I lowered my window all the way, hoping the chilly night air would focus my thoughts, but it did nothing except make my face cold.

Since I’d gotten my permit, every time we got in the car I begged my mom to let me drive, but even if we hadn’t been driving in Manhattan (where out-of-state residents can’t drive until they’re eighteen), I was way too distracted to even contemplate operating a motor vehicle. I kept thinking about how on the way to school I’d been pissed because on B days after lunch I have history, then physics, and then math. And I’d thought, I hope Livvie’s in school, because if she’s not, this day is going to suck even worse than it will if she’s not in school, which is a lot.

If you’d asked me on my walk that morning to list ten things I was worried about, I would have started with a pop quiz in history, because I’d only kind of done the reading. If you’d asked me to come up with ten more things, chances are global warming might have made it onto the list. And if you’d asked me to list another ten, I might have added something about bioterrorism, because sometimes when it was late at night and I couldn’t sleep, I worried about how my parents and I would get out of New Jersey if there were a terrorist attack.

But no matter how many multiples of ten you’d added, I just don’t think I’m worried that Olivia has cancer would have made it onto one of my lists. Because there are some things you worry about. And then there are some things you don’t worry about.

You don’t worry about them because they’re too awful to contemplate worrying about.

We pulled up into the driveway. I followed my mom up the stairs to the front porch and waited while she fished for her keys. She opened the door and flipped on the light. From the kitchen came a whimper.

“Oh my God,” my mom whispered. “We forgot all about Flavia.”

She raced into the kitchen, and I followed her. Flavia was lying on the floor, his paw covering his face as if he were ashamed. A few feet away was a small puddle of pee.

It was my job to give Flavia his afternoon walk. I pictured him waiting for me to get home from school, imagined how confused he must have been when I raced into the house and then raced out again, taking my mom with me instead of him.

I went over and dropped to the floor. “I’m so sorry, Flavia,” I said, putting my arms around him. “I’m so sorry.” For a second he seemed to resist my hug, and then he gave a little sigh and rested his head on my lap as if to say, I understand. I forgive you.

“I just forgot. Livvie’s sick, and I just forgot.” Flavia blinked at me. The last time I’d walked him, I’d gone over to Olivia’s house after. She hadn’t been sick then. Except she had been. I pictured her bone marrow, full of terrifying child soldiers, the kind that were sometimes featured on the front page of the New York Times, with their dead eyes and their automatic weapons. They’d been hiding out inside her, their numbers growing for weeks. Months. Maybe years? We were driving in and out of Manhattan and dancing and planning our glamorous futures, and all that time, an enemy deep in Olivia’s DNA was plotting and waiting and getting ready to strike.

“She’s okay, Flavia,” I said. “She’s going to be okay. Really. She is. You don’t need to worry, Flavia. She’s going to be fine.” And then I wrapped my arms around his body and the tight feeling inside me burst and I cried and cried into his soft, warm fur.

7

I would have said that after Livvie’s diagnosis nothing could shock me, but the next morning, when I pushed open the door to Wamasset High School minutes before the first bell, still bleary-eyed from my night of tossing and turning, it turned out there was something for which I was completely unprepared.

No sooner had I entered the lobby than there was an ear-splitting scream, followed by the cry, “Oh my God, Zoe!”

It was as if I’d tripped some personalized burglar alarm. I stood, frozen, waiting to see where the voice had come from.

The lobby was wall-to-wall people, but the crowds parted as Stacy, Emma, and the Bailor twins flew toward me, hurled their bodies at mine, threw their arms around my shoulders, and—and here I am not exaggerating—began to sob.

“Zoe, it’s so awful!” Stacy dug her chin into my shoulder. Her ponytail slapped my face.

“It’s just so awful!” Emma echoed. She was clutching my arm and patting the side of my head.

Within seconds, the rest of the cheer squad had gathered around us, all of them damp-eyed, a few with tears running down their faces.

Stacy released me from the hug, then grabbed my hand. “Zoe, we just love you so much.”

The cheer squad loved me?

“It’s true,” Emma asserted, though I hadn’t spoken my doubts out loud. She dropped her head onto my shoulder. “Have you seen Jake this morning?”

“Listen,” Stacy continued, “last night we were talking about doing a fund-raiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. And I just know that I speak for everyone at Wamasset when I say that we will all participate as we work to find a cure for this deadly disease.”

“Are you … planning a speech or something?” I asked.

She nodded. “To Principal Handleman. I’m going to propose we do a car wash and blood drive. Do you think Olivia would like that?”

They stared at me, waiting for an answer.

Do not be a total bitch. Do not be a total bitch.

“Um, yeah, that’s really nice of you guys. I’m sure something like that would mean a lot to her,” I said. My phone buzzed, and I checked the screen. OLIVIA.

“I have to go,” I said. I would have been relieved to hear from her anyway, but given my situation, her phone call was doubly welcome.

“Oh my God,” wailed Hailey. “Is that Olivia?”

“Yeah,” I admitted, “it is, actually.” I am not exaggerating when I say a reverent hush fell over the girls surrounding me, as if I had just told a group of nuns that Jesus Christ himself was on the line.

“Hi,” I said into the phone, ducking my head slightly so I wasn’t looking into all those eager faces. “Um, I’m standing here with the cheerleaders.”

There was a pause. Then Livvie said, “Seriously? But you hate those guys.”

I glanced up. Everyone was still staring at me. “Olivia says hi.”

“Hi, Olivia!” they shouted. “Tell her we love her!” a couple of voices added.

“They say they love you,” I repeated.

“Oh,” said Olivia. “Thanks.”

“She says thanks,” I said. Then I made a gesture to indicate I was having trouble hearing what was being said at the other end of the phone and began sliding toward my locker.

“Bye, Livvie!” cried Stacy. She began to wave, and the other cheerleaders followed suit, as if I were a cruise ship pulling slowly away from the dock.

“Zoe, you have to help us plan the car wash!” added Emma. I nodded and nodded and made the same I-need-to-go-somewhere-I-can-hear gesture and then I was blissfully out of the lobby and on my way down the two hundreds corridor.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “This is really weird. They want to do a car wash.”

“I know,” said Olivia. “Stacy sent me a text last night. And this morning I got an email. She signed me up to receive daily inspirational messages. Today’s was all about the goodness within me.”

“Holy shit! Did you puke immediately?”

Olivia gave a tired laugh. “Already did that.”

“Oh, honey.” I leaned against my locker. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know. Yeah. I mean, I’m okay.” She had this brave but tired voice that I’d never heard her use before. It made me want to crawl through the phone and curl up next to her on the hospital bed. The warning bell rang.

“I heard that,” said Olivia. “You’ve gotta go.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Whatever. I’ll be late.”

“Actually, I’m kinda cooked,” she admitted. “I just wanted to say hi.”

“Right,” I said fast. “Of course. I’m sorry. You get some rest. I’ll call you later.”

After we hung up, I opened my locker, but I didn’t take anything out or put anything in. My hands were shaking, and I leaned the side of my head against the cool of the metal shelf. On my locker door was the picture she had taken the first day of school. We were tan. Our smiles were wide, and I realized Livvie’s dress was blue and white and so was my shirt, almost as if we were wearing some kind of uniform. You two look like salt and pepper shakers. That’s what my mom used to say when we both had long hair. You’re a couple of salt and pepper shakers. And now here I was, just a stupid, lonely pepper shaker. What was the point of a pepper shaker without a salt shaker? I didn’t even like pepper.

“Hey, Zoe.” It was a boy’s voice. I figured it was Jake, but when I turned around what I saw was Calvin Taylor, who, apparently, had decided to acknowledge my existence.

“Oh,” I said. “Hey.” I was still thinking about Olivia’s voice. It had been so frail.

“How are you?” he asked. He was taller than I was, and he leaned down a little when he asked. Maybe because he was such a professional stud I’d imagined him smelling of cologne or aftershave or something equally … studly, but he just smelled like the outdoors.

I shrugged. “I’m great. Just, you know, peachy.”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Okay, why do I doubt that?”

“Well,” I snapped, “I mean, how do you think I am, Calvin? I suck, okay? I can’t even …” Why the hell was I confessing my feelings to Calvin Taylor of all people? I sighed and turned to the contents of my locker, but I couldn’t register them. Survive a month of school without Olivia? I might as well try to cross the Atlantic Ocean on an empty refrigerator box.

“You can’t even what?” Calvin asked. He’d moved around to stand next to me, but I didn’t turn my head to look at him, just kept staring at the spines of my textbooks and binders.

“I can’t even get my mind around it. I can’t even see it.” I lifted my hands and looked down at them. “First I think of Livvie, and that’s horrible. And then I think of her family and I feel so awful for them. And then I feel bad for myself.” I shook my head. “I do. I feel really sorry for myself, okay? Because I’m just that selfish.” I seriously could not figure out what books I needed for first period, and even if I could have, I didn’t give a crap about having them, so I just shut my locker and snapped the lock on it. Then I turned to face Calvin.

He was leaning against the locker next to mine. His snug T-shirt showed off his upper body, and he was wearing fitted but slightly low-slung jeans that made you know he had six-pack abs to match his broad, muscled (but not too muscled) shoulders. His hair was damp and sexy-shaggy. He pushed it off his forehead, revealing eyes that were an intense greenish-brown. Our eyes met. And as they did, I suddenly remembered the joke I’d made to Olivia about his being a vampire.

That’s when I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. I kept picturing him lowering his head and sinking his fangs into my neck. Now you are among the undead, foolish girl! You will worship me as do all the girls at Wamasset. Ha ha ha!

Tears of laughter ran down my face. Uneasily, Calvin asked, “Did I miss something funny?” but I couldn’t catch my breath long enough to answer him.

“You’re just so …” But I was laughing too hard to finish my sentence, and I didn’t even know for sure what I would have said if I could have spoken. “Nothing,” I gasped finally. “I’m sorry. Did you come over here to tell me something?”

He must have decided to write my laughter off as some kind of best-friend-has-cancer-induced hysteria because he continued talking without addressing it. “I just wanted to say …” He put his hand on my shoulder. His voice, when he spoke, was calm and soothing. “It’s going to be okay.”

Wait, had he seriously just said, It’s going to be okay?

Was that, like, supposed to comfort me?

Wiping tears of laughter out of the corners of my eyes, I reached up and squeezed his shoulder, then attempted to imitate his condescending tone. “Thanks, Calvin. I can’t … I can’t tell you how reassuring it is to hear you say that.” I started laughing all over again, and I was still laughing when I turned away from him and headed for physics class. Livvie, I wanted to scream, it’s bad enough that you have cancer. But why did you have to fall for such a cheese ball?

8

I’d been expecting to find Olivia asleep or maybe vomiting into a basin, but when I got to the hospital after school, she was sitting up in bed dressed in a pair of jeans and a plaid button-down shirt we’d gotten together at this old-school army-navy store last year. It was good to see her in regular clothes rather than a hospital gown. Her hair was in a thick braid down her back, a style she hadn’t worn in a long time. Her mom was sitting in the pleather chair next to the bed.

“You look really pretty,” I said to Olivia. She did, too. Young, but pretty.

She gave me a thin smile. “They started this new antinausea medication, so I’m supposedly feeling better already.”

“Well, that’s supposedly good news,” I said. “Hi, Mrs. Greco.”

“Hello, Zoe.” Mrs. Greco looked way more tired than she had the day before, and I wondered if she’d had as bad a night’s sleep as I had. “Would you Purell your hands, please?” She smiled at me, but it was a smile I’d never seen on Olivia’s mom’s face before. There was a brittle edge there, like any second it could crack and something sad and scared and ugly would poke through.

I went over to the Purell dispenser, hearing Livvie and her mom talking in whispers behind me. When I turned around, Mrs. Greco was still smiling that creepy smile. “Okay, girls,” she said. “I’ll give you some time. But half an hour. That’s it.” She fussed briefly with Olivia’s bed, and I noticed that someone had brought Olivia’s comforter from home. “Well, that’s better,” said Mrs. Greco, having fixed whatever was bothering her. “Okay. I’ll see you both in a bit.”

As soon as her mom left, Olivia sighed and dropped her head back against the pillow. “She is driving me crazy.”

“She’s freaked out,” I said, making my way over to stand by the bed.

“I wish she’d stop smiling for a minute,” said Olivia. “It’s freaking me out.”

“Yeah, that smile is fucking bizarre,” I agreed.

Livvie leaned toward me and took my hands in hers, then split her face into a terrifying grimace. “How are you feeling, honey? Are you tired? Would you like to eat something? Is it too cold in here? Is it too warm in here? Do you want to walk down the hall? Do you want your book? Can I get you anything? Anything at all?” With each question, she made her smile wider and more frightening. Then she flopped back and let go of my hand. “That’s why I finally let her braid my hair. I figured at least I wouldn’t have to look at her smiling while she did it.”

“It does look nice,” I said.

“I look like a third grader,” Olivia corrected me.

“A very pretty third grader,” I assured her.

She rolled her eyes at me.

“How are you?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I had to call Mrs. Jones at the rec center and tell her I was sick. They’re going to find someone else to teach the ballet class.”

“Oh.” I sat down in the chair her mom had vacated. “Well, I mean, that’s good, right? That they won’t have to cancel it or anything.”

“Yeah, I guess.” But her voice was sad.

I leaned toward her. “Livs?”

She toyed with the edge of her shirt, not meeting my eyes. “I like teaching the class, okay? And I’m just … I’m just feeling sorry for myself. Forget about it, okay? I mean”—she waved her hand around the room—“it’s not like I can teach the class from here. So let’s … let’s talk about something else. Tell me about your day.”

“Livvie …,” I started, and I reached for her hand.

But she shook her head and shut her eyes tightly, not facing me. “Tell me about your day,” she repeated. “Please.”

“Sure,” I said, not sure what else I could do. “Of course.”

Thirty-one minutes later, Mrs. Greco followed me out the door of Olivia’s room and down the hall. “Thanks for coming today, Zoe,” she said. “It means a lot to Olivia.”

I hoped it had, but I wasn’t so sure. Nothing, not even my Calvin-Taylor-really-is-a-vampire story, had seemed to cheer her up.

“I’ve spoken to Mr. Handleman,” she went on, “and it looks like—when she’s well enough—Olivia is going to be able to Skype her classes. But if there’s work that can’t be delivered via computer, I told him you or Jake could be the point person. I hope you don’t mind.” We were standing in front of the elevator, and Mrs. Greco pushed the down button.

“Of course not. I’m glad to help.” My parents always said Olivia was a part of our family, but I didn’t know if the Grecos felt the same way about me. Like, even though Livvie had been calling my parents Ed and Cathy since the day she met them, I still called her parents Mr. and Mrs. Greco. Sometimes I worried that they thought I was a bad influence on Livvie because our family wasn’t religious, my parents let me go to R-rated movies, my dad was a freelance journalist, and my mom earned more money than he did. Meanwhile, the Grecos went to church every Sunday, Mr. Greco was a lawyer who wore suits and went into the city every day, and Mrs. Greco was a stay-at-home mom. Livvie said I was totally paranoid, but I wasn’t so sure.

I didn’t want to explain to Mrs. Greco my whole theory about her thinking my parents were agnostic lefties with no family values, but I wanted her to know how much I loved Olivia. “I really hope you’ll rely on me in any way you can.”

I had this fantasy that Mrs. Greco would hug me, ask me to call her Adriana, and tell me that to her and Mr. Greco I was like family, but she just patted me gently on the cheek. “Of course,” she said. “We know we can count on you.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Greco,” I said. The elevator doors opened and I got on. “That means a lot to me.” And even though I was the one who said it, I couldn’t decide if I was being sarcastic or not.

I missed the train to Wamasset by less than ten minutes, so I had to kill almost an hour waiting for the next one. Penn Station’s got lousy stores, but whenever Livvie and I were stuck waiting for a train, we always managed to find something fun to do, even if it was checking out a shop full of lame touristy stuff or trying on tacky clothes we would never buy. Today, though, the time dragged while I wandered from Hot & Crusty to Duane Reade to New York Inc., finally settling in the waiting area, where I just sat and stared at the board listing the train departures. I couldn’t stop thinking about how sad Livvie had been all afternoon. Not that she shouldn’t have been. I mean, if getting a diagnosis of leukemia doesn’t give you the right to be sad, what does? But the crazy thing was, she almost hadn’t seemed sad about having cancer. It was like not teaching the dance class had been the straw that broke her back.

How was she going to last through weeks of treatment—months of treatment!—with nothing to look forward to besides Skyping her classes and receiving a daily inspirational message from the cheer squad? Thinking about her squeezing her eyes shut to stop herself from crying made me furious, and when I stood up after they announced the train to Wamasset, I was actually shaking my head, as if I were having an argument with the universe about the unfairness of it all.

And the worst part was, there was nothing I could do. I chucked my empty coffee cup in the trash and headed down to the platform. Dr. Maxwell’s telling me Livvie needed her friends suddenly felt like a bad joke. What did she need her friends for—so we could bear witness to her misery?

It wasn’t until the train was almost at my stop that I had my brainstorm. If Olivia could Skype her school classes, why couldn’t she Skype other classes? My hands were practically shaking with excitement as I dialed her number.

“Hey,” she said. She sounded really tired.

My idea burst out of me. “Let’s teach the class together.”

“What?”

I realized from how fuzzy her voice was that I must have woken her up, so I repeated myself, enunciating each word carefully. “Let’s. Teach. The. Class. Together! The dance class. We can use our phones. Or I’ll bring my dad’s laptop or something.”

There was a long pause.

“You don’t have to do this,” Livvie said finally. “I know you don’t want to do this.”

Was she serious?

“Livvie, come on. It’s so nothing.” Given what Olivia was going through, the idea that teaching her dance class with her was some big sacrifice had to be a joke.

I heard a voice in the background, and Livvie said, “I’m okay, Mom. Really.”

“Do you have to go?” I asked her. “We can talk about this tomorrow.”

“It could be a big job, Zoe,” said Olivia, ignoring my offer. “I might … I might be pretty sick sometimes, and … I mean, you might have to do it by yourself.” It sounded like she might be crying a little.

I made my voice mock angry. “Oh, so you think I can’t run a ballet class for beginners? Thanks a lot, bi-yatch!”

Olivia laughed. Like, really laughed. “The recital’s a lot of work—” she began.

“I’m not taking no for an answer,” I interrupted her. “So just, you know, stick that in your pipe and smoke it.”

There was another long pause. I stayed quiet, watching dusk turn the sky over New Jersey a deep purple.

“Zoe, are you sure?”

“Oh my God!” I cried, slapping my hand against the seat next to me. “Will you stop already? I’m doing it and that’s final.”

And suddenly Olivia didn’t sound tired or sick at all. “The girls are so great,” she said, speaking quickly. “I mean, they’ve just had the worst lives, but they’re still really into dancing. This one girl, Imani, she’s lived with four different foster families in the past year. Can you imagine that? Four families!”

I laughed. “Zoe, you don’t have to convince me. It was my idea, remember?”

“Oh. Yeah,” she said. Then she added, “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if I’d staged this whole cancer thing just to get you to teach the dance class with me?”

“Hilarious,” I said. The computerized voice announced, “The next stop is Wamasset. Wamasset is the next stop.”

I heard her mom in the background, and this time Olivia said, “I gotta go.”

“Of course,” I said right away. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Zoe.” Olivia sounded slightly out of breath.

“Love ya,” I said, and then she said, “Love ya,” and we hung up. I walked to the door of the car. Even though I hadn’t wanted to make a big deal out of it, I felt good. Really good. Waiting was the worst. Waiting to visit Olivia. Waiting for her to get out of the hospital. To get better. To come back to school.

Doing something—even teaching a dance class—beat the hell out of waiting.

9

Jake had offered to give me a ride to the rec center, but it wasn’t his car that pulled into my driveway at eight thirty on Saturday morning.

It was Calvin Taylor’s.

Even before I saw Calvin’s car, I was already in a bad mood. There was some problem with the hot water heater so my shower was freezing. Then I couldn’t find a pair of ballet slippers. That might not be weird for most people, but all my life I’d had a minimum of a dozen pairs of ballet slippers and half as many pairs of toe shoes lying around my room at any given time. But like I said, when NYBC gave me and Livvie the ax, I chucked everything I owned that was ballet-related, so even rooting around in the attic and basement didn’t turn up an old pair of shoes. On the one hand, it was kind of cool how thorough I’d been. On the other, I was fucked. I stood in my room fuming, surrounded by piles of everything I’d yanked off the floor of my closet and from under my bed. Finally, I just called Livvie at the hospital, and she said she’d tell her mom to give Jake a pair of her shoes to give to me. Livvie and I had the same size foot, and while you can’t share toe shoes with another dancer since they mold to your feet, ballet slippers—especially ones you’re not wearing for some major performance—aren’t a problem.

I was running late and racing downstairs to grab something to eat before Jake picked me up and drove me to the rec center in downtown Newark, where—while I taught ballet and the cheerleaders taught tumbling—he and a bunch of the other guys on the football team would be teaching kids how to bench-press or tackle or rape or whatever it was that football players knew how to do well. I’d no sooner stepped foot in the kitchen than Calvin Taylor’s car pulled up in front of my house, and I thought, I now have objective proof that the universe is determined to screw with me.

I yelled good-bye to my parents and ran out the front door, blaming Calvin for my missing the most important meal of the day.

“Hi,” I said, sliding into the backseat of Calvin’s vintage BMW.

“Hi,” said Jake. Calvin didn’t say anything.

“Oh,” Jake said, “I’m supposed to give you these.” He reached between the front seats and handed me a bag with the shoes inside.

Calvin backed the car out of the driveway. His car had soft leather seats. It was maybe ten or even fifteen years old, but it was in beautiful shape. It was one of the things that semiannoyed me about Calvin, how in addition to everything else he had this cool vintage car. Still, he was giving me a ride.

“Thanks for driving me,” I said.

“Sure,” said Calvin. His tone was clipped. I couldn’t tell if it was I’m-mad-at-you-because-you-laughed-in-my-face clipped or It’s-eight-thirty-and-I’m-not-a-morning-person clipped. Jake said something to him that I couldn’t quite make out, and Calvin responded, “Not if he’s still injured.” Then Calvin turned up the music so I couldn’t hear them at all, and I leaned back against the seat and stared out the window.

When Calvin turned into the parking lot of the rec center, which was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, I figured the facility would be as awful as the rest of the block, but it was actually a pretty nice three-story brick building. There was a huge mural on the wall by the parking lot that had a black teenager guy being frisked by a cop. All around them were people holding cameras directed at the boy and the cop, and above the picture were the words LOVE YOUR CITY. KNOW YOUR RIGHTS. It sounds depressing, but the colors were bright and the whole thing felt somehow energized and optimistic.

Calvin parked the car and the three of us got out. Jake put his arm around me as we walked toward the building.

“You doing okay?” he asked, squeezing my shoulders.

I loved Jake. Whether or not Mr. and Mrs. Greco saw me as family, Jake had always treated me like a little sister.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” I said, squeezing him back. “You okay?”

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “This is seriously fucked up, you know?”

There really wasn’t any other way to put it. “I know,” I agreed.

“Jake! Calvin! Zoe!” Jake and I turned around. Stacy, Emma, the Bailor twins, and Hailey were piling out of Stacy’s Lexus SUV.

“Come here, guys!” Emma called. She was gesturing us over frantically, as if the parking lot were on fire and she had discovered the only escape route.

Despite how annoyed he always seemed by Emma, Jake took his arm off my waist and headed toward the girls. “We’ll give you a ride home,” he said over his shoulder to me.

“Whipped much?” I teased him.

Laughing, he spun around in a full circle, pausing in my direction just long enough to give me the finger. “Just meet us back here after, okay?”

I shook my head, laughing also. “My dad’s getting me. I think he thinks we need some father-daughter bonding time.”

“Got it. See ya later.”

“Later.”

The girls literally swarmed Jake, and I watched him be engulfed by them. Emma managed to nuzzle in closer than all the rest, and when I saw him put his arm around her, I wondered if she felt triumph or just relief.

Stacy waved enthusiastically in my direction, but I just shook my head. It wasn’t until she called, “Calvin,” that I realized he was standing almost next to me.

“See you inside,” he called back. Then he started walking toward the entrance.

Watching him go, I thought about how he’d barely talked to me in the car. It started to make me feel a little uneasy. Maybe what he’d said about how everything was going to be okay was idiotic, but it had been a little bitchy of me to laugh at him like that. I flashed forward: If when Livvie got better she still liked Calvin and they started going out, the last thing I needed was my best friend’s boyfriend thinking I was a total asshole.

“Hey!” I shouted.

Calling after him made me feel a little like one of the cheerleaders.

He stopped and turned around. But he didn’t say anything or walk over to me. I covered the distance between us.

“So,” I began. “I … uh.” I chuckled nervously. “I feel kinda bad about how I acted when you came over to me. You know. The other day. At my locker.”

“Okay,” he said. His arms were crossed over the word Wamasset on his gray T-shirt.

“That’s it?” I crossed my arms also. “Okay?”

“Gee, Zoe, I’m sorry. I mean, I want to be good for a laugh. I just don’t know if we have the same sense of humor.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the cheerleaders head into the rec center, Jake holding the door for them. Stacy and one of the Bailor twins had their arms around each other’s waists.

I thought of Olivia and how before she got sick, I’d told her I wouldn’t teach the dance class with her.

All at once I felt incredibly tired. “Just … just forget it, Calvin. Whatever.” I took a step toward the building, but he put out his hand to stop me.

“‘Whatever’? You’re kidding me, right?” He gave an incredulous laugh. “Let me get this straight—Tuesday night, I’m at Jake’s house. His phone is ringing off the hook. Aunts, uncles, grandparents. Fucking Emma alone calls, like, fifty times. And I’m just hanging out, watching him talk to the ten million people who are checking up on him, and suddenly I’m like, ‘Wow!’” He made his voice thoughtful, reenacting the realization itself. “‘I’ve never been in this house without Olivia and Zoe being here.’ And then I’m like, ‘I wonder if anyone is calling Zoe,’ because it seems to me that you two don’t hang out much with other people, and I don’t know if you have a lot of other friends or anything. So Wednesday morning I decide to find you and see if you’re okay, and the next thing I know, you’re making me feel like a total dick.”